“BREAKING DEFENSE” By Carley Welch
“We still buy IT as if it was a weapon system,” John Hale, Chief of Cloud Services at DISA, said, adding that he sometimes felt he’s “banged [his] head against the wall.”
John Hale, Chief of Coud Services at DISA
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“The Department of Defense must streamline its information technology procurement and acquisition policies if the US wants to stay ahead of its adversaries in coming years, according to John Hale, the chief of cloud services at the Defense Information Systems Agency.
With the current policies, the DoD has to plan its budget so far in advance that it has trouble being flexible and adaptable to new technologies, Hale said during a General Dynamics Information Technology event Thursday.
“We still buy IT as if it was a weapon system. You have to do your planning and your budget cycles in such a way that don’t really facilitate agile capabilities,” he said. “It’s September of 2024. I just submitted my budget for 2026, and in that budget I had to submit my five year plan. So not only did I submit my budget for 2026, I had to also plan what I was going to spend all the way through to 2031.
“In today’s world with with how rapid things are changing and how agile technology and capabilities are, those are the handcuffs that we’re playing against,” he added.
Speaking to Breaking Defense on the sidelines of the event, Hale emphasized his concerns around falling behind China and other adversaries because the US’s current defense procurement and acquisition policies don’t account for unknown emerging technologies.
“What I don’t want to have happen is for some new capabilities to come available that we simply can’t get to in a timely fashion,” he told Breaking Defense. “We’re following policies that our adversaries don’t. So a lot of the capabilities that we’re talking about when we talk about AI, machine learning, our adversary is taking full advantage of them, and we are too for the extent that we can get access to.
“But the acquisition timelines that we have to deal with in the US are much longer than what our adversaries are doing. If we can streamline our acquisition processes, then we’re going to be able to put capabilities in the hands of the warfighter quickly,” he added.
Hales said US tech procurement is “rooted in 1945 thought and and we’re just, we’re way beyond that.”
Specifically, the stagnation is hindering one key process that’s under Hales immediate purview: the transition of DoD data to the cloud. When asked how he’s trying to fix this, Hale joked, “I pretty much just banged my head against the wall on a regular basis.”
In reality, he said that he works “very closely with the department’s acquisition arm, and we’re working diligently to try to change those policies where we can, but it is a long road.”
Hales’s frustrations are nothing new for the Pentagon, which for years has attempted in fits and starts to streamline emerging tech acquisition, especially when it comes to quickly evolving software, including through rapid development initiatives.
As far as the cloud goes, the Pentagon is in the midst of a massive migration to the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), an initiative launched in 2022 to provide cloud services for the Pentagon and each military branch. The contract is worth up to a collective $9 billion.
“We just crossed the $1 billion mark this last month of consumption of that contract vehicle, and so that provides an easy contract vehicle for the access to the four large, hyper scale cloud providers,” Hale said during his panel.”
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